


And So On

by Bosque



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Robert has feelings, Rosalind still doesn't approve of the whole thought experiment, and there are a million other ways for Booker to die but he just keeps falling, sort of one big guilt trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 13:06:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4565721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bosque/pseuds/Bosque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere a man will steal a child, if he hasn’t already, and fall asleep at night proud of the fact that his dream will live. Somewhere a man will lose a child, if he hasn’t already, and as penance, he will carve his shame into his hand for everyone to gawk at. It didn't bother her, but for some reason her brother refused to leave things as they are, were, and will be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And So On

Somewhere a man will steal a child, if he hasn’t already, and fall asleep at night proud of the fact that his dream will live. Somewhere a man will lose a child, if he hasn’t already, and as penance he will carve his shame into his hand for everyone to gawk at. It didn't bother her, but for some reason her brother refused to leave things as they are, were, and will be. In hindsight, Rosalind should have had foreseen this. In some universe she probably does.  
Simply put, and contrary to popular belief, she was the bird and Robert was the cage. You may wonder, however did this remarkable twist come about? It was a matter of gender roles, or rather, the refusal to adhere to them. Societal values normally would have tacked the burden of compassion on the Lutece with the two X chromosomes, and to the credit of those societal values, they did try very hard to do so. But she rejected them and so Robert had apparently taken up the mantle in her stead. He cared so she didn’t have to.  
Normally, Rosalind would be content to let him to continue caring and this variable between them would just slide by. After all, they couldn’t be exactly alike, as demonstrated by the single chromosome that had instructed his cells to become a man and hers to become a woman, or the way she preferred her tea just a little hotter than he liked his. But that single chromosome and the tea never caused much trouble. Robert’s compassion, on the other hand, did. The problem laid in the fact that he was trapped by morality, almost caged by it in a sense, while her aloofness allowed her more freedom. Robert cared too much, straying from the path of logic to follow conscience, with his guilt for a compass. That path had led them here, to the damned experiment. Robert insisted that it was only right after what he'd done, after what they’d done. So they set out to do the right thing and it became, like she guessed it would, more than an experiment. Although he would never admit it, it was her brother’s atonement. She saw it in the way Robert kept track of all the scars that would never appear, the invisible patchwork of past mistakes etched into Booker's body, the mistakes that killed him over and over and over. He had died one hundred and twenty-two times by now. The bodies came amidst various stages of death. Some were cold and heavy while others were seizing, eyes glazed over, with a pulse that refused to stutter to a halt. Those were the ones Robert sat down on the floor with so he can pull them into his lap. He wiped away the blood and saliva rolling down their chins with his pocket square. He stroked their hair and hummed a waltz. Once in a while, Rosalind would catch him cradling them and scoff or roll her eyes, reminding him that it was pointless because Mr. DeWitt would never remember the kindness. There was little he could to do ease their pain. He couldn't promise them that he would save them, that everything would be all right, or that they would be avenged. All he could do was hold them, rocking them until their hearts finally gave up and Booker DeWitt was dead once again.  
Robert made sure to keep track of those too, the deaths. More often than not, there was just too much blood spilling from the bullet holes splayed out across Booker's chest for his body to keep going. He also still couldn't seem to grasp the simple fact that Columbia was a floating city. For a man with a fear of heights, Rosalind thought it ridiculous that he kept falling. It was possible that, at certain speeds, if for some reason Booker happened to decelerate very suddenly mid-fall, the blood vessels tucked away inside him could actually be ripped apart and his cells might burst. Fortunately for Booker, though, he had yet to decelerate very suddenly mid-fall. It was probable that some day he might though. She often found herself hoping that Booker didn't find some new, excruciating end for himself, something beyond bullet holes and a miscalculated dismount from the skylines, for her brother’s sake. But maybe he would. He'd already crushed her and Robert's expectations on one hundred and twenty-two occasions and the man was, if nothing else, irritably consistent at times. It'd become rather frustrating watching him not only die, but die the same deaths over and over and over. When she pointed that out Robert argued that this predictability, this tendency towards repetition, did not, in fact, signify the failure of his experiment or a fault in a certain constant named DeWitt.  
Perhaps this time he would succeed.  
"You don't know that he will, brother."  
"Nor do you know that he will fail," Robert said.  
"Dies," she retorted.  
"Lives."  
Rosalind drew her mouth into a tight line and shoved the knife into the one hundred and twenty-third reincarnation of the dead man Booker DeWitt would find in the lighthouse.  
Her brother still held onto the hope that this fantasy would become truth. He desperately wanted this to be the universe where Booker didn't die again, like all the other times. He wanted this to be the first universe where Booker not only lived, but was also reunited with Anna. But the odds against him did seem to be stacked rather high, according to all the evidence the past trials had produced. No matter what Robert hoped for Booker DeWitt, this universe didn't care anymore than the previous one and would bring about another death anyway, another addition to the scars that showed the punishment Booker had received in exchange for his failure. If Rosalind did decide to mention this, her brother would probably say something about how the next scar, the next death might just be the one that pushed the next Booker to success. Her brother would continue singing sweetly in his cage about hope while somewhere a man will enter a lighthouse and a thousand others just like it, if he hasn’t already, and try to save his daughter once again.


End file.
